Feature > Poetry

Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, including Names (Norton, 2009) and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003) and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010). Among her translations from the French, Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008) received the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. For her own work, she received the PEN Voelcker Award for poetry in 2010. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Paris.

Time In Color (English Translation)

Quick! Colors through the window!
Colors on fields and forests
Before the weather changes
And changes everything
Empties fields and forests of their substance
And ponds and farms
How fleeting the sun is!
How the sky mocks our admiring gaze
Eternity is an optical illusion
Immensity a dubious abstraction
The wheatfields' gold - quick!
The pink of bricks piled on a building-site - quick!
The foliage's chilly green - quick!
The rust-color of bushes, train-tracks, roadbeds, quick!
The yellow of colza in nearly-black fields,
The silver of streams
The silt-browned green of fish-filled rivers - quick!
Cabbages' purple in well-mannered squares - quick!
The road's grey - quick!
The absolute blue of clear sun-softened autumn daysóquick!
Red! Red! Tractors', cars', traffic-lights' red - quick!
The red of a hunter's cap, his rifle wedged in his armpit - quick!
(And soon the imagined red of a slain beast's blood)
The metallic green of our roadside poplars - quick!
Blue slate roofsóquick!
The blue of distant mountains - quick!
Stone blue, horizon blue,
Blue light falling in a fine mist on the world - quick!
And white - I had almost forgotten white - the white of dusty roads, earthen ones
The white of cows lazing in pastures - quick!
Omnipresent white, that the eye disdains
Of a wall between two cypresses, of trucks going swiftly past
White - quick!
Then black! Black! The black of fertile earth ploughed over and over again - quick!
The black of a horse driven mad by the trains
Who gallops in crazed circles alongside the fence - quick!
The black of a village chimney silent as a closed mouthóquick!
The black of a village church-bell never to be caught up in the savior's armsó
quick!
White, black, green, pink, blue and goldó
Quick! Quick! Quick!

Emmanuel Moses

Emmanuel Moses was born in 1959. He is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently, Preludes et Fugues (Belin, 2011) and D'un Perpetuel Hiver (Gallimard, 2009), and of five novels. He is a translator of contemporary Hebrew fiction and poetry, notably of Yehuda Amichai. He and I, a collection of Moses' poems from recent books, translated by Marilyn Hacker, was published in 2009 in the Oberlin College Press FIELD Translation Series.